The Watchman On The Wall

Eph 6:12 For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. Verse 13 Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand.

Tuesday, June 13, 2017

How Long Will We Be Committed?

"We are there
and we are committed" was the regular retort of Secretary of State Dean
Rusk during the war in Vietnam.

Whatever you may
think of our decision to go in, Rusk was saying, if we walk away, the United
States loses the first war in its history, with all that means for Southeast
Asia and America's position in the world.

We face a similar
moment of decision.

Recently, a truck
bomb exploded near the diplomatic quarter of Kabul, killing 90 and wounding
460. So terrible was the atrocity that the Taliban denied complicity. It is
believed to have been the work of the Haqqani network.

This "horrific
and shameful attack demonstrates these terrorists' compete disregard for human
life and their nihilistic opposition to the dream of a peaceful future for
Afghanistan," said Hugo Llordens, a U.S. diplomat in Kabul.

The message the truck
bombers sent to the Afghan people? Not even in the heart of this capital can
your government keep civilian workers and its own employees safe.

Message to America:
After investing hundreds of billions and 2,000 U.S. lives in the 15 years since
9/11, we are further from victory than we have ever been.

President Obama,
believing Afghanistan was the right war, and Iraq the wrong war, ramped up the
U.S. presence in 2011 to 100,000 troops. His plan: Cripple the Taliban, train
the Afghan army and security forces, stabilize the government, and withdraw
American forces by the end of his second term.

Obama fell short,
leaving President Trump with 8,500 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, and Kabul's
control more tenuous than ever. The Taliban hold more territory and are active
in more provinces than they have been since being driven from power in 2001.
And Afghan forces are suffering casualties at the highest rate of the war.

Stated starkly, the
war in Afghanistan is slowly being lost.

Indeed, Trump has
inherited what seems to be an unwinnable war, if he is not prepared to send a
new U.S. army to block the Taliban from taking power. And it is hard to believe
that the American people would approve of any large reintroduction of U.S.
forces.

The U.S. commander
there, Gen. John Nicholson, has requested at least 3,000 more U.S. troops to
train the Afghan army and stabilize the country while seeking a negotiated end
to the war.

Trump's conundrum:
3,000 or 5,000 more U.S. troops can at best help the Afghan security forces
sustain the present stalemate.

But if we could not
defeat the Taliban with 100,000 U.S. troops in country in 2011, we are not
going to defeat a stronger Taliban with a U.S. force one-seventh of that size.
And if a guerrilla army does not lose, it wins.

Yet it is hard to see
how Trump can refuse to send more troops. If he says we have invested enough
blood and treasure, the handwriting will be on the wall. Reports that both
Russia and Iran are already talking to the Taliban suggest that they see a
Taliban takeover as inevitable.

Should Trump announce
any timetable for withdrawal, it would send shock waves through the Afghan
government, army and society.

Any awareness that
their great superpower ally was departing, now or soon, or refusing to invest
more after 15 years, would be a psychological blow from which President Ashraf
Ghani's government might not recover.

What would a Taliban
victory mean?

The Afghan people,
especially those who cast their lot with us, could undergo something like what
befell the South Vietnamese and Cambodians in 1975. It would be a defeat for us
almost as far-reaching as was the defeat for the Soviet Union, when the Red
Army was forced to pull out after a decade of war in the 1980s.

For the USSR, that
Afghan defeat proved a near-fatal blow.

And if we pulled up
stakes and departed, the exodus from Afghanistan would be huge and we would
face a moral crisis of how many refugees we would accept, and how many we would
leave behind to their fate.

Fifteen years ago,
some of us argued that an attempt to remake Afghanistan and Iraq in our image
was utopian folly, almost certain, given the history and culture of the entire
region, to fail.

Yet we plunged in.

In 2001, it was
Afghanistan. In 2003, we invaded and occupied Iraq. Then we attacked Libya and
ousted Gadhafi. Then we intervened in Syria. Then we backed the Saudi war to
crush the Houthi rebels in Yemen.

Given the trillions
sunk and lost, and the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, dead, how have
we benefited ourselves, or these peoples?

As Rusk said,
"We are there and we are committed."

And the inevitable
departure of the United States from the Middle East, which is coming, just as
the British, French and Soviet empires had to depart, will likely do lasting
damage to the American soul.